Musicians Kitty and Jack Norton were growing weary of gigs and bars and the road when tragedy struck several years ago.

“We were in a bad accident on the road,” Kitty says. “I remember my husband asking the emergency responders, ‘Is she going to live?’ ”

No one was sure.

Kitty pulled through, but her long and difficult re- covery gave her time to think.

“I knew I didn’t want to play in smoky bars anymore,” she says.

“I was so unhappy during that time that I kind of got to a breaking point. I thought, ‘Forget everything and anything else but this: What will make me happy?’ ”

The answer wasn’t what this rocker was expecting.

“I decided to go back to school to become a preschool teacher,” she says. “I don’t know where that idea came from, honestly, it was just one of those aha moments. It felt like a calling — and it sounded like fun.”

Her husband agreed.

“He thought it sounded like fun, too, so we both went back to school,” Kitty says. “At that point, we gave up music.”

That was shocking for this couple, who met while attending the Arts High School at the Perpich Center for Arts Education in Golden Valley in the late 1990s.

Eventually, though, music found its way back into their life.

“When I was in the classroom, the kids were not listening, so I tried using a crazy and silly voice,” Kitty says. “They perked up and listened.

“I decided that I needed a character to go with this voice, so I went home that night and made a horrible-looking sock puppet out of a black sock and named it Funky Possum. I still have it. It looks like some kind of weird prehistoric creature, but the kids loved it and saw the spirit of the character. Funky Possum started singing songs, and so I asked Jack to accompany her on guitar and it developed from there.”

Eventually, the couple’s act expanded to include other characters. The funny menagerie moved beyond the classroom to a school fundraiser and then to children’s birthday parties.

“We started doing so many shows that we thought, ‘This could actually be a career,’ ” Kitty says. “Lo and behold, we were doing music again, but it was fun and the hours were great — centered around naptime — and no more smoky bars.

“We realized we had found the best aspects of being teachers and professional musicians. It was the perfect career for us, one that we hadn’t reached out of desperation but by finding out what made us happier.”

Since that epiphany in 2007, the couple has left teaching and transformed into DJ Kitty and J-Star of the Zinghoppers. Drawing on their love of hip hop and electronic dance music has helped them keep kids ages 2 to 8 moving.

“We make every song a dance song,” Kitty says. “We’re preschool party rockers.”

The New York Times has described them as “Barney meets the Black Eyed Peas.”

The couple moved to Nashville, where the parents in their audiences included Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban and Kimberly Williams Paisley and Brad Paisley. As word spread in that music industry town, opportunities increased and so did the accolades, including a regional Emmy award.

“NPT, the PBS station in Nashville, reached out to us and asked us if we had ever thought of music videos or TV,” Kitty says. “This lead to us forming our own production company and doing a TV show.”

Their show debuted on NPT and has been picked up by more than 140 PBS stations across the country, but not including Twin Cities Public Television. In some markets, the entire show is broadcast; in others, musical excerpts air between shows.

After five years in Tennessee, though, the couple re-turned to Minnesota last fall.

“We will always love Nashville, which was the first place to air our show and where it all started,” Kitty says. “But it’s an industry town, which means everyone is always on the clock and everyone is in the music industry, a place where all the baristas at Starbucks can out-sing you any day of the week. We were homesick.”

The couple are still settling into their home, a rental near Lake Harriet in Minneapolis.

“We have two goals now, although they don’t really sound compatible,” Kitty says. “The first goal is to get back into the community and have a real personal life. In Nashville, everyone works 18 hours a day, seven days a week. Everyone is there to get a deal.

“We are really excited to just go out for a cup of coffee, walk around the lake, play with our two kittens that we got because we didn’t have time for any of this kind of regular stuff before.

“And our second goal is world domination.”

Both goals make them happy.

“It literally doesn’t feel like work, what we do,” Kitty says. “It’s a job, but it’s so much fun. You could be having the worst day, but when you get on stage, the kids are super excited and just dancing around. For some, it’s their first concert.

“Adults tend to need a drink to lose their inhibitions and start dancing. What we love about music for preschoolers is that they haven’t developed that kind of self-consciousness yet. Being happy and dancing is inherent to their personalities. It is so fun to cater to that, to help them dance and move, to be free and happy.”

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